As you wake up on the 1st of January and glance at Facebook, chances are your friends will be doing one of three things: posting yet another photo of the New Year’s Eve fireworks, gushing sentimentally about the year just gone or penning a list of ambitious resolutions for the year ahead. Perhaps there will be a few Bible verses or thanks to God thrown in courtesy of your Christian friends. And why not? Thankfulness is a Christian virtue, and we’re supposed to celebrate that it’s Anno Domini (AD–the year of the Lord). But what about new year’s resolutions?

Some think they’re an un-Christian form of self-improvement which does’t leave room for the work of the Holy Spirit, while others think they’re pointless as no one ever keeps them. Still others enjoy the reflective process, are natural goal-setters and like to make resolutions to be mindful of particular things they’d like to see change in their lives.

So what is the Christian to do? Is there a wrong way or a right way to go about it?

Before I became a Christian I never really made new year’s resolutions. Cynical about the way marketers had used them to make us feel unfulfilled and in need of more things/self-improvement programmes/gym memberships, I wrote them off as little more than a tool of capitalism.

But when I became a Christian, I started caring about my convictions and had a desire to grow in my faith and godliness. I started pondering the value of new year’s resolutions once again. But this time a new question emerged: were they the right avenue for this desire to grow and change? As is often the case with answers to big questions, I came to the conclusion: Yes and No.

On the ‘yes’ side I found the wisdom tradition in the Bible. Proverbs teaches us there is great value in aiming to live wisely in a fallen world, and that making godly, practical decisions can have great impact on our lives and the lives of others. Desiring to be ‘wise’ in 2014, you might aim for less screen time, to be more thrifty, hospitable or generous, to go gadget free or to volunteer at a local soup kitchen. There is nothing wrong with these practical goals, and the new year is a great time to think about being intentional with the year ahead.

However, the danger arises when a resolution becomes an attempt to align your whole life around a particular goal.

As an example, losing weight or running a marathon might be something you want to do in 2014, but to orient your whole life around that goal will only lead to disappointment. When you’ve shed those kilos or run 42 kilometres without stopping, you will still find yourself lacking happiness and satisfaction. And that’s because those things were never meant to be the centre of our lives.

When we make our goals more important than God, and more important than the things God calls us to prioritise, we turn our resolutions into mini-gods which rule our lives.

All of us have things we wish to achieve and change in our lives and this is a natural and Spirit-given instinct. But the Bible tells us that what we hope and dream for often reveals what we’ve enthroned in our hearts above God (our idols). In The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis describes the way the things we desire will turn on us if we entrust our future satisfaction with them rather than God:

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them,  and what came through them was longing.  These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

There is danger in worshipping the gifts God gives us in place of the giver (Romans 1:21-23). Paul tells us  if we do this, we become darkened in our thinking, fools exchanging the glory of God for created things. This is not to say resolutions are entirely bad. Like all decisions in life, we must examine our hearts, and entrust our futures to the God who is sovereign. The important thing is the heart of faith from which the desire springs.

Something I’ve found helpful the last few years is choosing a fruit of the Spirit as my New Year’s Resolution and praying God would grow that fruit (peace, joy, patience, kindess… whichever of the fruit I need more of) in me throughout the next year. Often by mid-way through the year I’ve forgotten which fruit I chose, which probably indicates I haven’t done a great job at continuing to pray for the fruit, but it’s one way of using the new year period to orient yourself towards God.

What about you? What resolutions have you made in the past? Have you kept them? Will you make new ones this year?

Feature image: Sean MacEntee via Flickr. Weight loss image: Alan Cleaver via Flickr. Used under a CC Licence